English used today is, something else to say the very least. The interesting decision to generally forego the grammatical notions of a language and abbreviate anything and everything to gain the slightest advantage in typing speed is heavily widespread in nearly all age groups. Also, attention span and reading styles have changed drastically in the last decade, and not for the better. “We don’t actually read on the internet, we just skip through some combinations of letters until we find our answer and be done with it.” is the general consensus that most people and experts would come to agree with. To add insult to injury, the rate of reading books has dropped dramatically, leading to the general public having a lesser command of their language. Quicker forms of communication and entertainment have put emphasis on less information and more visual content bereft of any profundity.

“It also found that fewer children enjoy reading, and that this dwindled with age: nearly twice as many five to eight-year-olds as 14 to 16-year-olds said they took pleasure from reading. Overall, just 53% of children said they enjoyed reading “very much” or “quite a lot” – the lowest level since 2013.“ (Donna Ferguson, The Guardian)

Indeed, we can’t expect everyone to represent the epitome of a society’s literal accomplishments and write as such, yet the problem lies in the fact that everyone has a voice which wasn’t the case before, as allowed by the dawning of the information age and its fruits. With that, education in fine letters and the social acceptance around it has changed, and did so for the worse. In older days, education was simply a matter of students being assigned key reading material such as Beowulf or some works from Geoffrey Chaucer and expanding from there, untainted and much less distracted in comparison to what we have today. With the advent of social media, everything became valued by the “clout” factor of any given visual content, as in how many different people can one image get interest from.

In an environment like this, the 3500 lines-long Beowulf simply cannot survive. All literature is either discarded or condensed to the point of mere symbolism and pop trash. And all communication is done via the most limited usage of language as possible, riddled with abbreviations, and mispronounced sentences.

Before and during the Elizabethan Age, the writing of poetry was part of the education of a young gentleman, and the books of sonnets and lyrics that appeared contained works from a wide variety of writers. These young gentlemen later would be able to contrive various works of literary art that would further the cumulative achievements of their predecessors.

Some examples:

“You can be fine most isn’t sometimes, which is fine, so am I. I’m just saying you might not have a great time waiting.”

“A person, just like you are right now, may not feel well all the time, and that is not a concern given the current circumstances, even I too suffer from it. In conclusion, my dear friend, you perchance might not enjoy the greatest liberties of human emotion while waiting.”

“She got up on the wrong of the D. When a person says some bed in the morning, thing they will regret.”

“She got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. If, god forbid, a foolish person makes the mistake of saying something bad to her, that will be an action they will come to regret.”

If we are not here to do the same, why do we even write at all?